Children & Families

Promoting Family & Community Safety

What was once a hidden problem is now the subject of open discussion and widespread reform. Today there is broad agreement that domestic violence has grave consequences for women and children—and that, for generations, the systems that should help families experiencing violence have often failed them. This is particularly true for families facing the complex, but common, challenge of dealing with violence that affects both a mother and her children. In the past 15 years, stakeholders, researchers and service providers have worked to improve the response to these fragile families, developing pioneering programs designed to address problems within and across systems. These new programs aim to support a child welfare system under severe strain, provide more comprehensive services to domestic violence survivors, create new roles for men who use violence who want to change their behavior or men who want to help families in crisis, address the many unmet needs of children who witness or experience family violence, and support prevention strategies that offer great promise to keep women and children safe. They have achieved a tremendous amount, and are beginning to fundamentally alter the ways some systems interact with and support fragile families. They have heightened awareness and increased understanding and knowledge about the risks and disruptions children face when their caregivers are abused, the resiliency some children show in the face of violence, the ways abused parents strive to shield and protect their children, and the challenges facing courts, child welfare systems and domestic violence service providers who work to keep women and children safe and hold batterers accountable.

Improving community and system responses to children and their families experiencing domestic violence and child maltreatment are key objectives of the FVPF's children's program. As a nation, we face the challenge of developing enhanced service interventions and community action strategies that will work to provide safety and security for all family members and prevent the problems of child abuse and violence against women from re-occurring. Through a myriad of projects including qualitative research with survivors and activists, child welfare reform efforts, community organizing efforts, and ground breaking work to engage fathers, the FVPF listens to families in order to create viable strategies for changing the social and institutional norms that perpetuate family violence. For too long our services have polarized families from each other and their communities- the FVPF is working with domestic violence programs, batterer intervention programs, family and juvenile courts, responsible fatherhood groups, child welfare agencies, supervised visitation centers, and community organizers to influence and form effective collaborations and build partnerships to promote safe and healthy families.